suck the water in my chest
by Lizzie83hp
Summary: She had been the catalyst, and now she would be the inhibitor.


She pulls back her phone from her ear and stares at the screen.

WILL GRAHAM – CALL ENDED

She can picture his dogs eagerly milling around him as he turns the lights off in his house and sneaks away. She knows exactly where his next move will be – he will be going straight to Hannibal's house.

But she will be there first. He is not aware that her gun and several more rounds are discreetly hidden away in her purse. He had no way of knowing that she was parked a street away from Hannibal's house.

Alana Bloom exhales as she tosses her phone into her purse. After she hears it clatter against the gun, she turns the key in the ignition.

* * *

The fine rain that misted against her windshield mere minutes before turns into a torrential downpour when Alana parks her car again, this time in front of Hannibal's house. She felt anger burning in her heart at the thought of how many times she had been to this house, how many times she had walked through the front door with a smile and without the knowledge of whose house she was walking into. The man she had believed lived there did not exist at all.

She pulls the key from the ignition, and puts them gingerly in her bag, her stomach beginning to knot. With great dread, she wonders what she will find inside.

Her feet feel heavy as she walks up the front path towards the house, umbrella in hand. She stares up at the house and forces herself to keep moving. _You need to do this._

She sees the slightly ajar door and begins to wonder. Hannibal Lecter is a man whose entire life revolves around order and control. He would never leave his front door open for anyone to just stroll inside, not in a million years. Jack must already be inside.

She stops on the porch to close her umbrella and lean it against the wall just before she hears the noise from inside. There are shouts and grunts, all divided by what sounds like heavy slams against walls and cabinets and the smashing of glass.

Her hands are already moving before her mind does, and in a fraction of a second she has her phone to her ear and her gun in her hand. Her fingers rub over the trigger and her pulse quickens as she thinks about what she is going to do.

"I'd like to report gunshots."

She lies to the operator and tells her that she is Hannibal's neighbour and that she is worried about suspicious activity. She stammers the address of his home before abruptly telling her that she has to go and hanging up. She figures that sounding panicked is the quickest way to get the police here. But then again, she lost all faith in law enforcement long ago, and she refuses to accept passivity any longer. All she needs is for them to be there when it all ends. Her phone is dropped back into her bag before she tightens her grip on the gun and enters the house.

The first thing that strikes her is how hauntingly quiet the house is. It's the sort of silence that is somehow deafening, the kind of silence that can shoot fear right into your heart in the right setting.

Much of the house is dimly lit, some rooms even pitch black. She holds the gun with both hands, halfway expecting Hannibal to be lurking somewhere in the darkness, waiting for whomever would come after Jack. She closes her eyes for a moment in a well-lit hallway to let them adjust to the darkness before moving forward.

Tonight, she thinks to herself, she will end this once and for all. She has been duped for months. Everyone has lied to her – Hannibal, Will, Jack, and even Freddie Lounds, though that hardly surprised her. She was a pawn in their game, and nobody deigned to tell her the absolute truth, nor had they ever intended to. Damn them, they hadn't even attempted to include her in finishing it. And she, more than anyone else, wants to see it finished.

Her fingers run over the trigger again. There was no time to wait for law enforcement, to wait until justice met Hannibal Lecter on its own, because it never would. She would need to bring it to him. After all, she had been the cause for all of this, hadn't she? She had gone to Jack and recommended him to the FBI. Had it not been for her, she would not be there with a gun in her hand, prepared to kill her old mentor and one of her closest friends. Jack Crawford would not be trapped in the house, likely wounded. Will Graham would never have landed in jail and he would never have been as unstable as he was. Abigail Hobbs and Beverly Katz would not have died – and _god_, she felt sick thinking about them. Alana Bloom included herself in their plan to finish the game before anyone else could make a move. She had been the catalyst, and now she would be the inhibitor.

As she nears the kitchen, she hears a pounding noise. Alana enters the kitchen with ease, her gun raised, and finds the source of the sound.

Hannibal is there, his usually crisp and immaculate dress shirt wrinkled and soaked with blood across one shoulder. _Jack's blood_. A knife in each hand, he is throwing himself sideways against the door to the pantry, grunting with effort. She knows who is hiding in there, as much as she doesn't want to think about it.

His name escapes from between her lips, but it is barely a whisper. It's lost in the sound of the door rattling as he slams against it again.

The next time she says it, she screams it with her gun pointed directly at him, unable to contain the fury that has been quietly bubbling inside of her for days. She knows that it's all going to come pouring out of her soon. The dam is broken, and there is no fixing it. She is not sure if she is more angry at him for what he has done, or at herself for letting him do it. She lets it pour out of her all the same.

She shakes and she glares and she screams some more before she feels hot tears prick at the corner of her eyes and her voice lowers to a scratchy murmur. She had been lied to, manipulated, blinded and _used_ for months – years, even – and he is so horrifyingly blasé about all of it. There is no apology, and there never would be. Not for any of it.

And this is the motivation she needs.

She pulls the trigger and receives a click in response.

Alana feels all of the air leave her lungs as she pulls the trigger again, and _again_.

Her bullets are gone.

Turning on her heel, Alana Bloom runs faster than she has ever run in her life. Stumbling a handful of times on her way, she scrambles up the staircase to the second floor, sprints down a hallway and locks herself in his bedroom.

Hands trembling in her panic, she throws her purse down on the nearest available surface and digs for another round of bullets. She loads her gun until she hears a satisfying clicking sound and turns again to the door. Seeing a shadow and hearing a creak, she fires three times, screaming at him as she does, determined to ensure that he knows she has no intention of giving up. She will not let him play this game with her or the people she loves. Not anymore.

His shadow disappears but she keeps her gun pointed at the door, waiting for him to break it down. The second she sees him, she will shoot him dead.

_Kill him. Kill him and get back to Jack. Kill him._

With all of her senses on high alert, it only takes her a fraction of a second to feel the movement of a figure on the other side of the room. With the fine hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, she whips around, her arms still raised and ready to fire.

Abigail.

She is moving gracefully across the room towards her, her skin deathly pale and her eyes empty. She seems thinner now, and _god_, she looks tired, and Alana can see that she is tearing up once when gets closer. Alana lowers her gun as the girl whispers an apology in a shaking, tearful voice. It sounds underused, and all she can think about is the fact that all of their lives had been thrown into disarray over a murdered teenage girl that was very much alive. A girl that suffered abuse and mistreatment time and time again, seemingly without end.

Her heart aching for the girl, Alana raises her arms to embrace her, but she never gets the chance to.

Abigail shoves her, hard, and suddenly she is moving too fast to even comprehend what's happening to her.

Falling, Alana thinks, is the most alive she has felt in a long time. No longer does she feel the darkness seeping through her body, and nor does she feel that familiar emptiness. She is aware of feeling in every limb, every droplet of rain that falls on her, every shard of glass that strikes her as she goes plummeting from the second floor window. She feels her heart beating, her blood pumping and her lungs sucking in the cold night air.

All of this ends when she hits the ground. Her head lands with a sickening thud on the hard tiles of Hannibal's front porch and she is sure she hears a snap once her whole body lands. She tries to figure out which bones she has broken, but her mind cannot be focused. Upon impact, it is as though a switch has been flipped – she felt so very alive, and then the pain becomes so absolutely unreal that for a brief moment, she wishes she had died instead.

Her entire body's nerve endings are live wires, sending torrents of agony through her if she so much as contracts a muscle. Even with her limited medical knowledge, she knows that staying still to avoid further damage is imperative, but she is in no state to put this knowledge into action. She can feel her body shaking, though whether this is from the pain or the ice cold water raining down on her, she is not sure. She tries to move one of her feet but it simply slips across the wet stone over and over. Her hands are trembling against the cool tile beneath her.

She can feel blood trickling from her nose, from her mouth, from a deep gash in her forehead. She can feel it, hot and sticky against her skin, pooling under her head and clotting in her hair. Glass has scraped almost every inch of her exposed skin. The rain is too cold and each drop is beginning to feel like a little pellet of hail, each one stinging her wounds as it lands. It falls in her eyes, pooling there and blinding her with each drop. Her mouth shakes open, but she cannot yet find the strength to cry out for help. She cannot even manage a whimper. She lies, full of pain, misery and fury, and not for the first time, feels as though she is drowning.

She understands now what it truly means to feel too much.

All Alana can think about is what she left inside. She thinks of Abigail, how she had begun to cry before she had moved closer, how she is still inside the house with _him_. She thinks about the number of times she had been in that house, in the room where Abigail had been, and how she had not known. How Abigail had been hidden away in the dark, alone and afraid, and she had not seen it. She cries for the girl. She knows that if _she_ had had to be taken care of now that the reckoning had come, Abigail Hobbs would not leave the house alive.

Nor, she thought, would Jack, who had given up his job and everything he had to come to the house tonight. In all likelihood, he was breathing his last breaths as she thought of him. She had not heard movement coming from the pantry in the minutes she had spent in Hannibal's trashed kitchen. She wonders who would be the one to tell his slowly dying wife.

She could have finished it for all of them. She could have killed him right there, shot him dead in his own home where so many others had met their ends. She could have helped Jack, she could have kept him alive long enough for the paramedics to arrive. She could have found Abigail and brought her back to a safety she so desperately needed.

Alana Bloom has never thought herself to be much of a religious person, but she prays for a way to reverse time, for her to be able to open her eyes sooner, to stop all of this from having happened at all. She could have prevented Abigail having been spirited away, from Jack having come to the house without backup. But then again, she had done the same, and he had probably come for the same reasons as her.

She hears a distant slamming noise, but cannot tell from which direction it came. But then she hears wheels on the street and her mind immediately leaps to wondering if the police have finally arrived. There is silence for a moment before she hears the sound of someone running on the pathway behind her head, their feet splashing through puddles of rain.

Then she is aware of someone beside her, someone leaning over and touching her waist, her arm, the side of her face. Whomever it is, they're quickly brushing shards of glass off of her, for which she is grateful. She is still gasping, and finally manages to force a whimper through her lips to let the stranger know she is still breathing, but barely. Something heavy and warm is laid over her.

"This is Will Graham. I need ERT at 5 Chandler Square."

Oh, god.

She tries lifting her head, moving her body in some way so that she can see him properly, but the rain keeps coming and she can't find his face. Every single part of her body screams in protest and she almost does too, but she forces herself to speak instead. More than ever before, she needs to make her words come out, because she knows that otherwise, he will stay with her. As much as the small, selfish part of her might want it, she can't let him. She has to be more brave now than she has ever been.

"Jack is inside," she gasps.

She can't stop the whimpers of pain from escaping her. Every bone is on fire, every part of her skin feels as though it has torn open and been set ablaze. Alana screws up her face to keep from openly crying out in front of Will and her pain turns to tears instead.

She whispers "go," and mercifully, he does.

It doesn't matter to her anymore if someone helps her. She needs the others to be safe, and as long as _he_'s in there and nobody else is, they will not be. She needs Will to stop him – to kill him, as she was prepared to do. She can't let anyone else die because of her.

Alana is crying now, her tears slipping quickly from the corners of her eyes and mixing with the rain and blood in her hair. She cries as her blood continues to run, as the cold continues to soak through her clothing and deep into her skin. The chill has permeated into her bones and she trembles so hard now that she has no control over her own movements. Her feet and hands have begun to numb.

She struggles to comprehend the passage of time. She doesn't even know how long she's been there for or how long ago Will arrived and went inside. All she knows is pain and the rapid increase of it. As it fills her completely, it begins to feel as though it is all she has ever known.

Her lucidity is slipping away from her. She is finding it harder and harder to breathe, each gasp for air, each internal press against her ribs – which only brings her even more pain – also makes every sense she is capable of using fuzzier around the edges. She slows her breathing as much as she is capable of doing to save her energy. She closes her eyes and focuses as much as she still can.

Then there are footsteps beside her again and for a fleeting moment, her heart leaps at the thought of Will having returned.

But the footsteps do not stop. Casual and slow, they continue past her without the slightest moment of hesitation at the sight of her bleeding, broken body. Will would not leave her like this. He would not go past her and into the street.

She feels bile rise in her throat once she realizes who would. She wonders, with horror, what he has done to Will. To Abigail.

Everything becomes fuzzier and darker. Her still-shaking limbs are heavier. The sound of rain hitting the ground, even on the tiles directly surrounding her head, seems much more distant. She strains her ears anyway, listening for the sound of more footsteps from inside the house.

But she does not hear any.

What she thinks might be several minutes later, and to her great relief, she thinks she hears sirens far off in the distance. If Alana Bloom had any moments of strength or tears left in her body, she would have used them. Instead, she lies there, whimpering as she wonders what the paramedics will find inside before the pain fills her entire being and unconsciousness takes her.


End file.
